Klaus Barbie: women testify of torture at his hands

from the Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of The
Philadelphia Inquirer

LYON, France--In 1944, when she
was 13, Simone Lagrange testified
yesterday, Klaus Barbie gave her a
smile as thin as a knife blade,
then hit her in the face as he cuddled
a cat at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.

Lise Lesevre, 86, said Barbie tortured her
for nine days in 1944, beating her, nearly
drowning her in a bathtub and finally breaking
one of her vertebrae with a spiked ball.

Ennat Leger, now 92, said Barbie
"had the eyes of a monster. He was
savage. My God, he was savage! It
was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he
pulled my hair back. He put a bottle
in my mouth and pushed it until the
lips split from the pressure."

The three women were among
seven people who took the witness
stand yesterday to testify against
Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo
in [Paris] during the Nazi occupation
of France in World War II.

Barbie, 73, is on trial in Lyon, accused
of torturing Jews and members of
the French Resistance and
deporting them to Nazi death camps.

But he did not hear their testimony
because he has refused to attend
the courtroom sessions since
the second day of the trial, as
he may do under French law.

He has, however, denied the
accusations against him and has
contended that his 1983 extradition from
Bolivia to France was illegal.

Several of the seven witnesses yesterday
sobbed as they told of arrest, torture,
rail convoys to the Drancy collection
center near Paris and on to concentration
camps.

They depicted Barbie as a harsh,
sadistic officer ready to resort to any
cruelty to extract information.

Lagrange, her voice breaking, recalled
the arrest of her father, mother and herself
on June 6, 1944, the day Allied troops landed
in Normandy to drive back the Germans.

Denounced by a French neighbor
as Jews and Resistance fighters,
Lagrange and her parents were taken
to Gestapo headquarters where a
man, dressed in gray and caressing a
cat, said Simone was pretty.

"I was a little girl, and wasn't
afraid of him, with his little cat. And
he didn't look like the typical tall,
blond SS officer we were told to
beware of," she said.

The man, whom she identified as
Barbie, asked her terrified parents
for the addresses of their two
younger children.

"When we said we did not know,
he pulled my hair, hit me, the first
time in my life I was slapped," she
said.

During the following week, the
man hauled her out of a prison cell
each day, beating and punching at
her open wounds in an effort to
obtain the information.

"He always came with his thin
smile like a knife blade," she said.
"Then he smashed my face. That
lasted seven days."

Later that month, Simone and her
mother were put aboard a sealed
train for the Auschwitz concentration
camp on a horror ride "which turned us
into different people" and that still
gave her nightmares 40 years later.

From Auschwitz, where her mother
was gassed, the inmates were
marched to Ravensbruck, where
only 2,000 of the 25,000 people who
began the march arrived alive. On
the way, Simone saw her father
marching in another convoy.

"A German officer told me to embrace
him. As we were about to meet,
they shot him in the head," she said.
"It wasn't Barbie who pulled the trigger,
but it was him who sent us there."

Ennat Leger, who lost her
sight at Ravensbruck after her arrest, was
hoisted to the witness stand in her
wheelchair by four policemen.

She was a Resistance fighter nearly
50 years old when she was arrested
in 1944, she said, and Barbie and his
men "were savages, brutal savages,
who struck, struck and struck
again."

"Have you heard of the Gestapo kitchens?,"
she quoted him as saying, in an
allusion to the torture chambers.

Lise Lesevre, frail and upright
despite her 86 years, described the
defendant as "Barbie the savage,"
saying she recognized him decades later
because of his "pale eyes, extraordinarily
mobile, like those of an animal in a cage."

Lesevre, who belonged to a resistance
group, said the Gestapo arrested her
on March 13, 1944, while she was
carrying a letter intended for a
Resistance leader code-named
Didier.

She said Barbie spent almost three
weeks trying to learn if Lesevre was
Didier, and if not, who was. She was
interrogated for 19 days, she said,
and tortured on nine of them.

First she was hung up by hand
cuffs with spikes inside them and
beaten with a rubber bar by Barbie
and his men. "Who is Didier, where
is Didier?" were Barbie's main questions,
she said.

Next was the bathtub torture. She
said she was ordered to strip naked
and get into a tub filled with freezing
water. Her legs were tied to a bar
across the tub and Barbie yanked a
chain attached to the bar to pull her
underwater.

"During the bathtub torture, in the
presence of Barbie, I wanted to drink
to drown myself quickly. But I wasn't
able to do it. I didn't say anything.

"After 19 days of interrogation,
they put me in a cell. They would
carry by the bodies of tortured people.
With the point of a boot, Barbie
would turn their heads to look at
their faces, and if he saw someone he
believed to be a Jew, he would crush
it with his heel," she said.

"It was a beast, not a man," she
said. "It was terror. He took pleasure
in it."

During her last interrogation, she
said, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on
a chair and struck her on the back
with a spiked ball attached to a
chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she
still suffers.

"He told me, 'I admire you, but in
the end everybody talks.'"
But she never did, and she heard
Barbie say finally, "Liquidate her.
I don't want to see her anymore."

She was condemned to death by a
German military tribunal for "terrorism"
but was placed in the wrong
cell and deported to Ravensbruck
concentration camp, where she survived
the war. Her husband and son did
not. She said they were both deported to
their deaths by Barbie.

Lesevre said she identified Barbie
in February in a face-to-face confrontation
at St. Joseph Prison, where he is being held.